This invention relates generally to control panels and more particularly to control panels useful for control of electrical equipment, especially factory and industrial electrical equipment, including, but not limited to motors and lighting.
Known control panels for electrical equipment (such as motors, lights or other factory electrical equipment) provide a plurality of switches and controls, most or all of which control currents between five amperes up to thousands of amperes. The control panels themselves can range in size from, for example, 0.3 m×0.3 m×0.1 m (12″×12″×4″) up to at least 1.825 m×2.435 m×0.9125 m (6′×8′×4′). The switches and controls are hard-wired. Control panels entail significant manufacturing and labor costs due to application and option variation. Also, a single control panel product family may require several million catalog number permutations to support all available options.